Hardly Plane Sailing
Total number of different airport terminals I've been through in the last two weeks: Eight.
Total number by the end of this week: Ten (assuming New York is open by Thursday)
That's a lot of bad sandwiches, foil-topped plastic containers of orange juice and being frisked by hefty blokes with bad cologne (Don't ask me, I don't know - these days I even take my belt off as a matter of course and still I set those damn things off).
There are people I know who think all this travelling I do is glamorous; that somehow it's a jet-set existence full of excitement and, well, yes, glamour. I'd like to dispel this myth once and for all. It's not. The inevitable mad dash through airports caused by leaving the office at the last possible minute is just stressful and in my case sweat-inducing; the subsequent lines of people waiting to get through security merely depressing, and the actual flights are increasingly lost to me as I either work through them or use them as interludes for recovery from the ground-based pressures involved in getting onto them.
Even a long flight like the one on which I'm writing this tends to create a strange mix of experiences - the first few hours are hard to get anything done in, filled as they are with the round of drink service, meal and cabin crew generally being all over the place, which then give way to the yawning prospect of seven hours looming ahead which have to be filled with a combination of work (done as much as I can), watching the in-flight entertainment (the CSI two-parter directed by Tarantino), exploring the stuff I put on my ipod for the trip (three series of Ladies of Letters? somehow I'm not in the mood), reading the paper (done that; even the sports pages), and then reaching the point where you're wondering when they'll be coming round with 'afternoon tea' (shouldn't be long).
And behind all that there's the clear knowledge that every single time I get on a plane I'm part of that ongoing ruinous process of damage to the planet arising from the plane journey itself and the resources used up in getting me and three hundred other people from A to B. Long flights are bad because they do more of the damage, but also because they give you time to think about stuff like that.
I love travelling - despite all the above I even enjoy flying when it's not work-related - but there are times when I wish I'd never set foot on a plane. If I'd never done it, I wouldn't know what I was missing by having all my holidays in Britain.